Through an unexpected source, namely Twitter, Google has officially announced the release of the latest update to its ranking algorithm, Panda 3.4.

This update, which rolled out on March 24, is targeting low-quality websites. The update was specifically a “refresh”, so it seems no new signals or algorithm changes were made. This has resulted in very little impact to the majority of websites.

While the 1.6% of websites that were hit will notice quite an impact, this is a very small effect to the overall traffic worldwide.

Before Panda 3.4, the previous update 3.3 was released at the end of February and this is the one that webmaster had been dreading as its impact was quite widespread.

While all these updates are good for search overall, many webmasters are unhappy with their frequency. In the past year there have been 14 known updates to the Google algorithm and after each update, webmasters and SEO professionals are forced to scramble to salvage their website’s ranking in order to win back the traffic they lost.

Here is a timeline of all the updates in the last 12 months:

Panda 3.4 on March 23rd

Panda 3.3 on about February 26th

Panda 3.2 on about January 15th

Panda 3.1 on November 18th

Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th

Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th

Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th

Panda 2.5 on September 28th

Panda 2.4 in August

Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd

Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so

Panda 2.1 on May 9th or so

Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so

Panda 1.0 on February 24th

Not a lot is know about the impact of Panda 3.4 yet, we’ve not heard much from the usually very vocal SEO/webmaster community, but we have to assume that no news is good news.

Has your traffic or ranking taken a dip since March 24? If so, we would love to hear your experience. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Panda 3.4 screwed my site over bigtime. We were #7 from the top but the new Panda has us lower than the 15th PAGE. Not sure where we are but quit searching on page 15. Not sure what we have to do to fix this.

By
John - March 29, 2012

[...] GoogleRollsOutPanda 3.4 Update — Google stirred the panda pot once more with even more updates to its famous algo. iNeedHits reports there isn’t much to panic about, but you’ll have to read it to find out why. Google alsode-indexedafewmorelinknetworksfromitsresults as part of these updates. [...]

Panda 3.4 has hit a lot of spammer sites and the sites who were using automated submissions. Google is changing their algorithm frequently and still they are ready to throw another attack on over optimized websites.

This gets boring over time, if google updates and u are afected, but u where very happy when u where link farming/ not providing decent content before getting caught i dont understand why u are unhappy. Well, one simple advice, the old ways of SEO wont work more than 1-2 years in the future so if u still whant to stay in the SEO business u should think about distributing your time 30% on site optimization, 40% content and 30% link building to get a decent ranking in google.
The time u spend and what u can do with that time are all up to you.